Nor is it to be expected that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and other heathen nations should have an exalted idea of virtue, when we consider the character of the gods they worshiped. The Egyptian deities consisted of bulls and dogs, cats and rats, snakes and crocodiles. When a dog died the whole house went into mourning and fasted till night. A Roman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was punished with death (_see Diodorus Siculus, Book I_). The "great, mighty and transcendent soul," as Carlyle terms it, had been degraded so low that there is a picture in one of the pyramids, of an Egyptian king worshiping his own coffin. The Greeks from their intercourse with the Jews learned some correct religious ideas, especially after the conquest of Palestine by Alexander, and the translation of the scriptures into the Greek language, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, B. C. 240. Before this period little sense can be found in their religion. Their gods were as detestable as they were numerous. Hesiod tells us they had thirty thousand. Their supreme god, Jupiter, was an adulterer. Mars, a murderer. Mercury, a thief, Bacchus, a drunkard and Venus, a prostitute. To their inferior gods they attributed other crimes too horrible to be mentioned. These gods {82} they worshiped with ceremonies of lust, drunkenness and bloodshed unfit to be described. If any one supposes that the condition of the modern heathens is any better than it was in ancient times, let him turn to India, where he will find one hundred and fifty millions of rational beings, possessing, as Theodore Parker says, "all needful spiritual light," who worship three hundred and thirty millions of gods in the form of hills and trees, rivers and rocks, elephants and tigers, monkeys and rats, serpents and crocodiles, and monsters unlike anything in heaven or on earth. The monster idol, Juggernaut, will do as a specimen of all. Around his temple countless multitudes from all parts of India, congregate annually, many of them having measured with their own bodies the whole distance of their weary pilgrimage. Within the temple, the monster idol, with its frightful grim and distorted visage, sits enthroned, amid thousands of massive sculptures, the representative emblem of that cruelty and vice which constitute the very essence of his worship. There in their sacred city of Benares may be seen at all times crowds of religious devotees and mendicants; some remaining all day with their heads on the ground and their feet in the air; some cramming their eyes with mud and their mouths with straw; others with their limbs fastened in unnatural positions, and still others with little pots of fire placed upon their breasts, hoping by these self-inflicted tortures to win the favor of the god. When the day of the high festival arrives, the horrid idol is {85} dragged forth from his temple and mounted on a lofty car in the presence of hundreds of